Nabokov Studies, 1 (1994), 195-206.

LEONA TOKER (Jerusalem, Israel)

LIBERAL IRONISTS AND THE "GAUDILY PAINTED SAVAGE": ON RICHARD RORWS READING
OF VLADIMIR NABOKOV Over and over again, my mind has made colossal efforts to distinguish the faintest of personal glimmers in the impersonal darkness on both sides of my life. That this darkness is caused merely by the walls of time separating me and my bruised fists
from the free world of timelessness is a

belief I gladly share with the most gaudily painted savage.1 The essay on Nabokov in Richard Rorty's Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity2 is important not only as a record of a powerful mind's journey of discovery but also as an implicit recognition that despite, or because of, Nabokov's rejection of affiliations and engagement, his works have captured some major issues on the modem cultural agendaeven if in ways not congenial to Rorty. Here, however, after discussing Rorty's
valuable contribution to Nabokov's studies, I shall have to record a disagreement with some of his statements, or rather "sentences," on
Nabokov.

Rorty may have expected some such protest. It is one of his central tenets that Truth does not exist "out there," beyond and apart from our

1. Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (New Yoik: Putnam, 1966), 14.

2. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989. The book wil hereafter be referred to as CIS with page numbers given in the text. Several scholars have already used Rorty's discussion of Nabokov h theirwoik; see John Burt Foster, Jr, "Not T. S. Eiot, but Proust Re-

vsionary Modernism in N abokov'sPa/ef re," Comparat'wc Literature Studies, 28 (1 991), 67 n25; Julian W. Connolly, Nabokov's Early f-ction: Patterns of Self and Other (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992), p. 7; and David Rampton, "The Last Woid in Nabokov Criticism," Cycnos 10(1993), 159-65.

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constructions of it, or rather our vocabularies for red escribing reality (see esp. QS 4-1 9). He regards each scientific or scholarly discipline, and each theory within that discipline, as just such a redescription, adding that "truth" is the property of sentences rather than whole vocabularies (QS 7). Vocabularies can, however, be provisional, partial, unsatisfactory. The "liberal ironist," as conceived by Rorty (QS xv), reads literary critics because he credits us with having "been around," with having "an exceptionally large range of acquaintance" with different vocabularies, and so with being "in a better position not to get trapped in a vocabulary of any single book" (QS 80-81)even, let us add for pragmatic consistency, if the book is by Rorty himself.
I

Following Judith ShklaKs Ordinary Vices, Rorty defines a liberal as a person who believes that "cruelty is the worst thing we do" (QS xv); Nabokov is then recognized as a liberal because he speaks out against cruelty. Rorty notes that there are two kinds of novels that do so: "Fiction like that of Dickens, Olive Schreiner, or Richard Wright gives us the details about kinds of suffering being endured by people to whom we have previously not attended. Fiction like that of Choderios de Laclos, Henry James, or Nabokov gives us the details about what sorts of cruelty we ourselves are capable of, and thereby lets us redescribe ourselves" (QS xvi). In other words, Nabokov's works deal less with victims than with victimizers, showing us why we can all find ourselves on the side of the hammer rather than the nail. According to Rorty, this is particularly true of Lolita and Pale Fire, the two novels which he considers Nabokov's "acme" (QS 161 n)though, the question of artistic merit aside, the case of Van Veen of Ada would be more to the point than
that of Pale Fire's Kinbote.

Rorty discusses Nabokov's thematic and rhetorical approaches to the issue of cruelty. The thematic approach consists in the portrayal of artists or quasi-artists who do not synthesize ecstasy with tenderness and, in their pursuit of ecstasy, do not care, or do not care enough, for the suffering of others. Thus, Rorty notes, Nabokov concentrates not on "the 'beastly farce' common to Lenin, Hitler, Gradus, and Paduk," but on "the special sort of cruelty of which those capable of bliss are also capable," on the possibility "that there can be sensitive killers, cruel aesthetes, pitiless poets masters of imagery who are content to turn the lives of other human beings into images on a screen, while simply not noticing that these other people are suffering" (QS 157). Indeed, the theme of a clash between one's aesthetic or metaphysical pursuits and

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one's moral commitments runs through the whole of Nabokov's oeuvre; it finds its highest expression in Humbert, the seeker of ecstasy. For

Nabokov, aesthetic bliss is bound up with "curiosity, tenderness,

kindness, ecstasy."3 "Notice that 'curiosity' comes first," comments Rorty (QS 1 58) and goes on to discuss Humbert as a monster of incuriosity.

To illustrate Humbert's "inattentiveness to anything irrelevant to his own

obsessions" (QS 163), Rorty quotes the folbwing sentence from Lolita: "In Kasbeam a very old barber gave me a very mediocre haircut: he babbled of a baseball-playing son of his, and, at every explodent, spat into my neck, and every now and then wiped his glasses on my sheetwrap, or interrupted his tremulous scissor work to produce new paper clippings, and so inattentive was I that it came as a shock to realize as he pointed to an easeled photograph among the ancient gray lotions, that the mustached young ball player had been dead the last thirty
years."4

The rhetorical procedure (this is our jargonRorty does not call it names) consists in reader entrapment: Rorty puts most literary critics to

shame by connecting the scattered references to Dolly's dead little brother with the reference to happy normal child Avis Bird's chubby little
brother at home. He shows that the incuriosity with which Humbert treats the Kasbeam barber is also evinced by ourselves if, preoccupied with other things, we do not understand that Charlotte really mourned

the loss of her younger child and that, for Dolly, the inaccessible normal family life would come to be represented not only by Avis's healthy pink
dad but also by the little brother. It is not only Humbert but the reader too who is found guilty of "incuriosity," or of downright obtuseness to suffering. Rorty notes: "The reader, suddenly revealed to himself as, if not hypocritical, at least cruelly incurious, recognizes his semblable, his brother, in Humbert and Kinbote. Suddenly Lolita does have a 'moral in tow/ But the moral is not to keep one's hands off little girls but to notice

what one is doing, and in particular to notice what people are saying.
For it might turn out, it very often does turn out that people are trying to

tell you that they are suffering. Just insofar as one is preoccupied with
building up to one's private kind of sexual bliss, like Humbert, or one's
private aesthetic bliss, like the reader of Lolita who missed that sentence

about the barber the first time around, people are likely to suffer still
more" (QS 163-64).

3. Vladimir Nabokov, The Annotated Lola, ed. Alfred Appel (New York: McGrawHiI, 1970), p. 317. 4. Ibti., p. 215.

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What Rorty has described here, more with the case of Dolly's
brother than with that of the barber's dead son, and still more with the connection between the two, is a set of conditions that Nabokov

creates for a self-referential turn in reader response-from reading the text to reading and "redescribing" oneself. Such a turn is an interpretive strategy which modern literary criticism seeks to turn into a reading
convention. Il

My protest is about three things: (1) Rorty's pointing to cruelty

rather than callousness as the main target of Nabokov's fiction, (2) the conclusions that Rorty draws from Nabokov's remarks on aesthetic experience, and (3) his comments on Nabokov's conjoining, as it were, literary immortality with metaphysical, or "literal," immortality. 1. By way of introducing the first of these three subjects, let us note that Lolita creates conditions for quite a number of self-referential twists on the part of the audience. For instance, on the first reading of the episode in the Enchanted Hunters Hotel we tend to share Humbert's obtuseness" concerning Daffy's need to talk to him about her sexual experience in Camp Q. Here, however, when we come to understand the undercurrent meaning that, like Humbert, we formerly overlooked, we have to admit that the reason for this "incuriosity" may have been not the pursuit of "aesthetic bliss" but, quite possibly, a voyeuristic anticipation of a sexual scene.5 Humbert waives Dolh/'s inchoate confessions as irrelevant infantile nonsense, and on the first reading we tend to do the same. In Humbert's case (and this is also true of Van Veen in Ada, Kinbote in Pale Fire, and Ganin in Mary), neglect of another person's inner conflicts or

suffering occurs not only when that person is "safely solipsized"6 but
also, and mainly, when his or her interests or experience hinder, or are irrelevant to, one's own pursuit of ecstasy, transcendent insight, or success

in practical endeavor. The vice that this neglect stands for is not cruelty
but callousness. Cruelty is a deliberate rejection of pity; callousness is absence of pity owing either to plain insensitivity or to a deliberate suppres-

5. For more detail see my discussion of this episode in Nabokov: The Mystery of Heraiy Struclures (Ithaca, NY: Comelt Univ. Press, 1989V pp. 203-05. 6. Nabokov, The Annotated Lolita, p. 62.

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sion of awareness. One of Nabokov's approximate definitions of art was "beauty plus pity."7 For Rorty cruelty seems to mean not just a deliberate infliction of pain but also any sort of insensitivity to the suffering of another; it thus overlaps with callousness. But such an expansion of the term subverts the point contained in the definition of a "liberal." For Judith Shklar a liberal is a person who places cruelty first in the list of the worst vices because cruelty causes fear, and fear destroys freedom.8 Callousness does not have such a direct effect on freedom, though it often functions as a tacit accomplice of cruelty. One could argue that some kinds of callousness are actually very cruel. This would apply, first and foremost to one's ignoring that suffering of another which one is actually causing.9 This kind of callousness is an attribute of what one calls "brutality,"10 but a "liberal" would still hesitate to put it first in the list of vices. Nabokov did speak out against cruelty (in particular, against torture), and he did present some of his protagonists as brutal, yet the vice that is most keenly targeted in his work is insensitivity to any kind of suffering,
whatever ts cause.11 This does not mean that callousness was the vice

that he hated most: the worst crimes are sometimes regarded as philosophically uninteresting because there are no extenuating circumstances for themas there may be for callousness, the often elaborate background of this century's mass atrocities. 2. Rorty objects to Nabokov's dismissive attitude to writers like Orwell or Zola who seek to negotiate social change by evoking moral outrage at social evils. He quotes Nabokov's statement that "the study of the sociological or political impact of literature has to be devised mainly for those who are by temperament or education immune to the aesthetic vibrancy of authentic literature, for those who do not experi7. Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on literature (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1980), p. 251. 8. See Judith Shklar, Ordinary Vices (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ.
Press, 1984), pp. 2,7-15.

9. Marcel Proust, for hstance, comments on "that indifference to the suffering one causes which, whatever other names one gives iL is the most terrible and bsthg fotm of cruelty." Remembrance of Things Past Trans. C K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kiknartri (New York: V ht age Books, 1981), I: 180; my italics. For this reference I am indebted to
John B. Foster.

10. Cf. Bernard Wiliams, Ethics and the Units of Philosophy (London: Fontana/CoHiis, 1985), p. 14. 11.1 discuss the moti of calousness ri Nabokov's dystopian fiction in "Who Was Becomhg Seasick? Chcinnatus': Some Aspects of Nabokov's Treatment of the Communist Regime," Cycnos 10 (1993), 83-84.

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ence the telltale tingle between the shoulder-blades."12 Here what Nabokov says is that the aesthetic enjoyment of artistic detail is not rational; it is figuratively that he therefore locates it not in the head but in the spine.13 Yet he further offends by saying that "that little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science."14 It is impossible to disagree with Rorty that this dictum "spells out the relevant sense of the term 'pure'" and is quite compatible with saying that "the ability to shudder with shame and indignation at the unnecessary death of a child... is the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained while evolving modern social and political institutions" (QS 147)-though in fact one should shudder at much less than that. However, in the ensuing discussion Rorty chooses to take Nabokov's "Housmanian" metaphor literalry and reduce it ad absurdum: "Orwell shares some important purposes with Dickens (produces shudders of indignation, arousing revulsion and shame), and Nabokov snares others (producing tingles, aesthetic bliss)" (QS 148); "here we are not told merely . . . that 'pure art and pure science' culminate in such tingling trifles. We are told that these tingles are 'the highest form of consciousness'" (QS 148); "if you want your books to be read . . . you should try to produce tingles rather than truth. . . . Truths are the skeletons which remain after the capacity to arouse the senses to cause tingleshas been rubbed off by familiarity and long usage" (OS 152). In the text of a philosopher who has an amazing way with words, this repetitiveness is not accidental. The sexual connotations of the last example are probably not accidental either, but connotations become almost lethal when Rorly refers to "people whose brains are not wired up to produce tingles, but who are, for example, good at producing shudders of moral indignation" (QS 151). Here the vocabulary is suspiciously reminiscent of the image of the electrode operator in J. J. C. Smart's defense of utilitarianism: somewhat uneasily, J. J. C. Smart describes "the voluptuary of the future," a person with "a number of electrodes protruding from his skull, one to give the

12. Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, p. 64. 13. N otrig that poetry (the rare indefinable genuine quality of only some vese) seems to be "more physical than intellectual" A. E. Housman enumerates several kinds of somatic responses to it, such as 'a shiver down the spine," 'a constrctbn of the throat and a precpitatbn of water to the eyes," and a piercing sensation in'the pit of the stomach." Al of these are a matter of setting up "n the reader's sense a vibrt on correspondre to what was felt by the writer." The Name and Nature of Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1940), pp.47, 12. 14. Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, 64.

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physical pleasure of sex, one for that of eating, one for that of drinking."15 Rorty's Nabokov is one of "special sorts of people" who have "specially wired brains" (QS 153n)Rorty needs this unfortunate metaphor to demystify such obscurantist notions as talent, inspiration, intuition. And despite the compliment that Rorty soon afterwards pays Nabokov by treating him as one of us liberal ironists, the passages just quoted gel into a caricature. If for Rorty's Nabokov the highest artistic value lies in producing pleasurable little spasms, if not by electrodes then by beautiful images, it "is only his occasional criticism of individual callousness and cruelty that saves him from being relegated back to "art for
art's sake."16

3. Rorty conjoins Nabokov's dream of literary immortality with his lifelong quest for the intimations of literal, that is, personal immortality: "He is sure that there is a connection between the immortality of the work and of the person who creates the workbetween aesthetics and metaphysics, to put it crudely" (QS 150). True, two pages later Rorty contradicts this: "as Nabokov ruefully admitted, nothing could lend plausibility to that claim" (QS 152). If we wish, we can read his earlier "Nabokov is sure" as a stylistic oversight or dismissive off-handedness. Yet the contradiction is what makes Rorty's version of Nabokov consonant with his description of liberal ironists, who "combine commitment with a sense of the contingency of their own commitment" (QS 61 ). The
trouble is that the intuitions to which Nabokov is committed are too

alien for Rorty,17 even if they may be not exactly what Rorty thinks them to be. Hence the pragmatisfs "amused condescension" similar to that of "later generations looking back at their ancestors."18
Ill

15. Smart goes on to consider the value of "a few hours' work a week, automatic factories, comfort and security from disease, and hours spent at a switch, continually electrifying various regions of one's brain." LJ-C. Smart and Bernard Willams, Utiliarian'sm: For and Against (London: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1973), p. 19. 16. Such a view was, as is known, widespread in the first decades of Nabokov criticism but it has been steadily bsing ground, especialy shce Elen Piter's well arugued protest in Nabokov and the Novel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1980). 17. The very concept of intuition is, for Rorty, defiled in Wittgensteriian terms, as "never anything more or less than famliarity with a bnguage-game," so that "to discover the source of our htuitbns is to reive the history of the phibsophical language-game we find ourselves playing" Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mrror of Nature (Prbceton: Prhceton Univ. Press, 1979), p. 34. 18. Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Essays: 1972-1980) (London: Harvester, 1982), p. xxx.

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But what if it is the belief in the moral effect of moments of

"aesthetic bliss" that lies behind Nabokov's placing "the highest value" upon them?19 According to Henri Bergson, whom Rorty also mentions in conjunction with Nabokov's philosophy (QS 152 n14), perception is delayed or virtual action: we tend to see and hear that which is relevant to our choosing a course of action. The education of the senses consists in our learning to perceive precisely what is not relevant for any practical endeavor, to perceive details for their own sake: "Conscious perception signifies choice, and consciousness mainly consists in this practical discernment. The diverse perceptions of the same object, given by my different senses, will not, then, when put together, reconstruct the complete image of the object; they will remain separated from each other by intervals which measure, so to speak, the gaps in my needs. It is to fill these intervals that an education of the senses is necessary."20 By educating our senses we thus learn to fulfill Kant's criterion for aesthetic experience, namely, disinterestedness. Given a spot of joy, our disinterested perception of what is useless reenacts some of the author's own "rapture," which, Nabokov says, "has no conscious purpose in view but which is

all-important in linking the breaking up of the old worid with the building
up of a new one."2> Yet the education of the senses means learning to perceive not only what gives us joy; it may also increase our responsiveness to the irrelevant pain of another human being, to that which makes an appeal to pity
rather than to the sense of the beautiful.22 The education of the senses

19.1 the past I tended to see this vabe ii Schopenhaueran terms: during moments of aesthetic transport the WlI of which an individual is a frite objectcatbn is slenced
and hence subdued. Such moments are therefore akin to those of inmortal discoveries

say of a new kind of butterfly: the WiI here comes to know itself and moves cbser to sel-cancellation. In any case, bypassing rationally and hteligence, individual aesthetic transport may have an ennobing effect on individual personalties. The im'tatbns of this view become, however, apparent when one recolects the great numbers of genuhe bvers of art, music, poetry among the mass muidereis of the present century. 20. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory. Authorized translation by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (London: Allen and U nwin, 19291 pp. 46-47. 21. Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, p. 378. 22. Cf. I ris Murdoch: "The pohttessness of art is not the pointlessness of a game; it is the pointlessness of human l-e itself, and form in art is properly the srnufatbn of the selfc ont abed arnbssnessof the universe. Good art reveafe what we are usually too selfish and too trnid to recognize, the minute and absolutely randomdetal of the world, and reveafe it together with a sense of unity and foim. This form often seems to us mysterious because it resists the easy patterns of fantasy. Art transcends selfish and obsessive irritations of personalty and can enlarge the sensibilty of ts consumer. It is a kind of goodness

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may thus help us shed that kind of unintentional callousness which George Eliot may also have had in mind when she remarked that "we are all of us bom in moral stupidity"23; though it is obviously far less effective in the case of the deliberate, entrenched, self-protective callousness of the kind that Arthur Koestler clamored against in "On Disbelieving Atrocities."24 In the art of living, "beauty plus pity" has to be achieved through the hard work of attention to others and critical self-inspection. Literary im-

mortality is not just the preservation of one's name in the annals but the
possibility to prolong, beyond the life-span of one's generation, the effect that the treasures of one's own consciousness may have on sharpening the sensibilities and promoting the self-inspection of others.
Nabokov did want to believe in some form of the survival of consciousness but did not envision this survival as a reward for artistic

achievement. The connection between the two might rather work the other way round: contact with the transcendent realm, in the shape of inspiration, or intuition, or insight, or mystical experience, might help to produce literary work of lasting value. In an attempt to diagnose what it might feel like to have to say sentences like Nabokov's (a risky business), Rorty claims that Nabokov disbelieves in social change, perhaps in response to the early tragic loss of his beloved father whose whole life was dedicated to liberal reform (QS 156). Nabokov was, indeed, not sanguine about the possibility of mas-

sive social improvement, though he was quite outspoken about his absolute preference for a pluralistic democratic society. Mainly, however, he believed in the distribution of roles between a journalist and a writer. Orwell and Solzhenitsyn were, in his economy, journalists.25 A writer should deal with that which is "real" to him, "real" meaning, broadly, that
to which one devotes concentrated attention. Thus in the account of his

life in Europe before World War II, he refers to the "flat and transparent

by proxy. Most of all it exhibits to us theconnectbn, inhuman beings, of clear realst c vison with compas son. The realism of a great artist is not a photographic reaism, it is essenrjaly both pity and justice." The Sovereignty of Good (New York: Schocken Books, 1971 ),
pp. 86-87.

23. George Elbt, Middlemarch (Harmondsworth: Penguh, 1976), p. 243. 24. See Arthur Koestler, The Yogi and the Comissar and Other Essays (London: Jonathan Cape, 1945), pp. 94-99. 25. As journalists they were entitled to his admration. Nabokov admired Solzhenisyn's courage and sent hin a welcomhg private letter on his arrival to the West; see Vladrnr Nabokov, Selected Letters 1940-1977, ed Dmitri Nabokov and Matthew J. Bruccoli (San Diego: Hancourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1989), pp. 496, 527-28.

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figures cut out of cellophane," the "perfectly unimportant strangers, spectral Germans and Frenchmen in whose more or less illusory cities we,

migrs, happened to dwell," and then mentions an occasional brutal

shift in the sense of reality: "occasionally ... the spectral world through which we serenely paraded our sores and our arts would produce a kind of awful convulsion and show us who was the discarnated captive and who the true lord."26 Nabokov's total freedom from paranoia stemmed from not allowing the socio-political oppression to become "real" in his inner world. Extrapolating this attitude, he imagines "fellow dreamers" trapped in totalitarian states yet still roaming the earth and keeping "to these same irrational and divine standards during the darkest and most dazzling hours of physical danger, pair* dust, death."27 It is only indirectly that this passage does deal, as Rorty has put it, with "the
nature of moral motivation" (QS 154).

Rorty believes that Nabokov has created "a private mythology of a special eliteartists who were good at imagery, . . . whose lives were a synthesis of tenderness and ecstasy, who were candidates for literal as well as literary immortality, and who, unlike his father, placed no faith in general ideas about general measures for general welfare" (QS 168). Nabokov would probably define this elke-differentljr, but in any case, he did not grant it any privileges apart from the privilege of being his favorite reading. He did not tolerate cruelty, callousness, vulgaritybarring these, he was prepared to recognize the intrinsic value of different human goals, intuitions, and institutions. Rorty, however, tends to dismiss whatever does not stand the test of intellectual probing. He dreams of a utopia in which everyone is a liberal ironist (OS xv-xvi ff). Utopias are, of course, implicitly exclusive arid based on a denial of the multiplicity of incommensurable human goals. This is why, as Isaiah Berlin notes, there has been a marked decline of the Utopian thinking in the West28 At the risk of raising the ghost of the Cretan liar's paradox, one could note that even in Rorty's entirely pluralist utopia of liberal ironists, the very commitment to pluralism would have to be regarded as contingent. I would be grateful to be convinced that Rorty's ideal

26. Nabokov, Speak, Memory, p. 276. 27. Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, p. 373. This may have been the reason for Nabokov's appreciation o- Sasha Sokolov's A School for Fook; see Brian Boyd Vladrn'r Nabokov: The American Years (Princeton: Prhceton Uriv. Press, 1991), p. 656; and D. Barton Johnson, Vladimir Nabokov and Sasha Sokolov," The Nabokovian 15 (1985) 2939.

28. See lsiah Beri'n, The Gooked T'nxber of Humanity: Chapters in the Hstory of Ideas (London: John Murray, 1990), pp. 1-48.

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community of liberal ironists is not a fantasy of turning each benighted one of us, each "gaudily painted savage" (the make-up may be by the best advertised designers) into a member of the Mannheimean intellectual elitewhereupon this elite would shed its exclusiveness. However that might be, one of the roads towards this utopia is through expanding human solidaritynot, Rorty explains, on the basis of an admission of some common human core, but through emphasizing what one shares with others,2 9 in particular, with the formerly marginalized groups (QS 196). For Nabokov the need for solidarity with marginalized groups is not an issue because it is self-evident (for this reason he would find it an uninteresting subject, just as for a set of different reasons Rorty finds it philosophically uninteresting to talk about "the Truth"30): far more important is to leam to get rid of one's solidarity with, say, a Humbert-type intellectual who may seem to be "one of us"; get rid of it not because of his belonging to some group (emigrants, Semitic types, people with weird sexual preferences) but because of his individual moral qualities or acts, the damage that he allows himself to do. This is in tune with the Bergsonian view that not everybody deserves our solidarity. The suppression of solidarity would not, of course, mean, for instance, denial of succor in a medical emergency31we do certain things out of moral commitments that can be defined without the notions of "solidarity" or "identification"; rather, it would mean that tout comprendre does not have to mean tout pardonner. Bergson, moreover, believes that there is a limit to one's mechanical expansion of sympathies: love for humanity as a whole cannot be systematically worked towards. It can only be a product of religious experience.32

29. Rorty's concept of soldant/ B associated with his concept of "personhood" as "a matter of decisbn rather than knowledge, an acceptance of another being into felowship rather than a recogritbn of a common essence" (Phlosophy and the Mirror of Nature, p. 38). Cf. Cora Diamond, The Raliste Sprit: Wttgensteri, Philosophy, and the Mhd (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), pp. 319-34. 30. One of these reasons is Rorty's denial of the intrhsic moral value of truth; for a response to Rorty's comments, h QS, on the issue of truth h Orwell's 1984, see Cora Diamond, Truth: Defenders, Debunkers, Despisers," in Commiment in Reflection: Essays in Literature and Moral Phibsophy, ed. L. Toker(New York: Garland, 1993), pp. 195-221. 31.1 am grateful to Cora Diamond whose strnufatng comments have made me rethink this and a number of other issues whle working on the penultimate version of the article

32. "We cannot repeat too often that it is not by preachhg the bve of our neighbor that we can obtain it It is not by expandhg out narrower feeings that we can embrace humanity. Howevermuchour riteligence can convince itself that this is the lneof advance, things behave differently. What is simple for our understanding is not necessarily so for our

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Rorty, indeed, refuses to view human solidarity as identification with "humanity as such"this he believes is "a philosopher's invention, an awkward attempt to secularize the idea of becoming one with God" (QS 198). What I believe to be misleading in his redescription of Nabokov is probably based on unwillingness to credit the experience
that Nabokov describes as the sense of "oneness with sun and stone."33

Nabokov, however, is prepared to admit solidarity with "the most gaudily painted savage" not merely on the basis of, say, shared parental feelings or love of nature, but also on the basis of shared intuitions that defy the strictures of intellect. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

wil. In cases where bgic affrms that a certain road should be the shortest, experience intervenes, and finds that in that directbn there is no road. The truth is that heroism may be the only way to bve. Now, heroism cannot be preached, it has only to show iself, and its mere presence may stirothers to actbn.... Relgion expresses this truth in its own way by saying that it is h God that we love al other men." Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morally and Religion, trans. R. Ashley Audra and Ooudesley Brereton (Garden Qty, NY: Doubleday, 1954) p. 53. 33 Nabokov, Speak, Memory, 1 39.